A JAR OF
WILD FLOWERS
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A JAR OF
WILD FLOWERS
E S S AY S I N C E L E B R AT I O N
OF JOHN BERGER
E D I T E D B Y YA S M I N G U N A R AT N A M
W I T H A M A R J I T C H A N DA N
Zed Books
LONDON
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A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in Celebration of John Berger
was first published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry,
17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK.
www.zedbooks.net
Editorial copyright © Yasmin Gunaratnam and Amarjit Chandan 2016
Copyright in this collection © Zed Books 2016
‘A Gift for John Berger’ by Ali Smith. Copyright © Ali Smith, 2015,
used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
The rights of Yasmin Gunaratnam and Amarjit Chandan to be
identified as the editors of this work have been asserted by them in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Typeset in Haarlemmer by seagulls.net
Cover design by Michael Oswell
Cover illustration by Mélina Berger
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78360‑880‑5 hb
ISBN 978‑1‑78360‑879‑9 pb
ISBN 978‑1‑78360‑881‑2 pdf
ISBN 978‑1‑78360‑882‑9 epub
ISBN 978‑1‑78360‑883‑6 mobi
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For all exiles.
Welcome.
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CONTENTS
List of figures
xi
Acknowledgementsxiii
Foreword – Jean Mohr
Preface – Amarjit Chandan xv
xix
INTRODUCTION
– YASMIN GUNARATNAM
1
THE COLOUR OF THE COSMOS
19
Graphite – Hans Jürgen Balmes
21
Hay – Rema Hammami and John Berger
30
Fire – Kathryn Yusoff 42
Milk – Ana Amália Alves 52
Blood – Gavin Francis
61
Forest – Nikos Papastergiadis 71
Toast – Michael Broughton 85
Oil – Tessa McWatt 90
THE TREES ARE IN THEIR PLACE
103
Fences – Nick Thorpe
105
Method – Iain Chambers 118
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Life – Glenn Jordon
131
Meetings – Nirmal Puwar 142
Pain – Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián 154
Secrets – Hsiao-Hung Pai 171
ONCE THROUGH A LENS 183
Memory – Heather Vrana 185
Stars – Vikki Bell 200
Conscience – Ram Rahman
217
Performance – Doa Aly 222
A Mirror – Rashmi Duraiswamy
235
UNDEFEATED DESPAIR
249
Trauma – Alicia Salomone 251
Jest – Salima Hashmi 264
Hate – Mustafa Dikeç 270
Hope – Malathi de Alwis
285
Spirit – Tania Tamari Nasir 297
Propaganda – Rochelle Simmons 307
HERE IS WHERE WE MEET
321
Notes – Amarjit Chandan 323
Verbs – Ali Smith 329
Play – N. Rajyalakshmi interviews 338
Pushpamala N.
Tenderness – Christina Linardaki
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Love – Julie Christie 356
Courage – Yahia Yakhlef 358
Solidarity – Ambalavaner Sivanandan
365
Tennis – John Christie 370
AFTERWORD – SALLY POTTER
379
About the editor and contributors
387
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O N A M O T OR B I KE T O
T E S S A M C WAT T
For two centuries we’ve believed in history as a highway which was
taking us to a future such as nobody had ever known before. We
thought we were exempt. When we walked through the galleries
of the old palaces and saw all those massacres and last rites and
decapitated heads on platters, all painted and framed on the
walls, we told ourselves we had come a long way – not so far that
we couldn’t still feel for them, of course, but far enough to know
that we’d been spared. Now people live to be much older. There
are anaesthetics. We’ve landed on the moon. There are no more
slaves. We apply reason to everything. Even to Salome dancing. We
forgave the past its terrors because they occurred in the Dark Ages.
Now, suddenly we find ourselves far from any highway, perched
like puffins on a cliff ledge in the dark.
This speech, from the taxi driver in John Berger’s novel To the
Wedding,1 gives us Berger the man, the voice, the storyteller.
Here we have the two key elements of his alchemy: the guidance
of history; and the imperative of the ordinary. In one paragraph
he guides our gaze to our past predicaments, through art, while
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grounding us in an ordinary moment in a coach, as a group of
people travel towards their individual futures. Zdena, to whom
the taxi driver is speaking, responds like this:
I can’t fly.
Well, nor can I. Perched like puffins on a cliff ledge in the
dark – yes, I see us there. Now. But when I read Berger, I come
as close as I ever might to feeling that I might be able one day to
lift off. To see clearly. To hope. Even possibly to fly.
My relationship with Berger, the work and the man, began
through To the Wedding. This single book and my ongoing
endeavour to develop a film based on it are touchstones to his
influence more broadly. Berger uncovers angles in the world
that broaden it. He draws us not only to ways of seeing, but
also to ways of being, by example. John is all about motion. His
verbs: to listen, to see, to share. And specifically, in the case of
To the Wedding: to journey.
‘The most important thing to pay attention to’, Berger has
said about the title of the novel, ‘is the preposition – to.’ His
commitment to action is manifest in that imperative. We are
all travelling to– where we’re going is of minor consequence.
The journey is what counts. Action and motion: these make
life bearable.
The motorbike with its headlights zigzags up the mountain.
From time to time it disappears behind escarpments and rocks
and all the while it is climbing and becoming smaller. Now its
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light is flickering like the flame of a small votive candle against an
immense face of stone.
To the Wedding the film was sparked by a coup de foudre (a
phrase used by many to describe first encounters with Berger)
in 1995 when the book first appeared. I distinctly remember
reaching the end of the novel with the hairs rising up along my
neck in response to the image of Ninon standing before Gino
in her wedding dress, which is soiled like a flag after a battle.
This arrival would be enough in itself – a moment possible only
through Gino’s persistent love for Ninon, who would soon die
of AIDS. But we arrive at the wedding already changed. Jean
and Zdena travel towards one another after many years, to the
wedding of their dying daughter, and it is this journey through
loss and reconciliation that has us agreeing with Zdena: Let
these days never end, let them be long like centuries! Through
fragments, voices, and a defiance of linearity, the story unfolds
like a secret. With the Berlin Wall down, the borders open, we
travel through more than just territories. The changed and
changing face of a continent is explored through encounters
with its inhabitants, and through the lens of a generation
of activists. Walls are down between the young and the old.
Between life and death. The final cadence is so elemental that
it’s devastating: Her skin glistens. A simple gesture ends the
novel, as Gino undoes a single braid of Ninon’s hair.
A rush of air. An overwhelming lightness. My fate was sealed.
Many years later, I, like the novel’s blind narrator, still
cling to words or phrases which seem to ring true. The narrator
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is a tamata seller whose wares give comfort to those in peril
like Jean, who buys one for the daughter who is suffering
everywhere. A tama provides that in exchange for a promise
made, people hope for a blessing or a deliverance. My promise
has been to the film adaptation, and the deliverance has been a
deepening relationship to aesthetics and authenticity.
Up there in the sky there’s no need for aesthetics. Here on earth
people seek the beautiful because it vaguely reminds them of the
good. This is the only reason for aesthetics. They’re the reminder of
something that has gone.
I first met John Berger in 2000. It had been his book that I had
held up to my producer friend when he’d asked me if there
were any stories I’d loved so much that I wanted them brought
to a wider audience through film. ‘This one,’ I said, waving it,
stealing Michael Ondaatje’s back cover quote: ‘Wherever I go
in the world I will have this book with me.’
My friend gave me John’s phone number the next day. ‘Call
him,’ he said.
Spellbound by Berger the writer and the man, I didn’t see
how a cold call would be possible. I wrote to him, explained my
intentions, described my passion, and a few days later he called
me. His voice – with its unique, hybrid accent, its now familiar
hesitations and qualifications that are the aperture to insight –
told me that while he supported an adaptation, he wondered if
one was necessary.
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‘The story exists,’ he said. ‘It is there, for anyone who wants
it.’ This angle on necessity levered open issues of commod­
ification that have governed my approach to the adaptation.
For John, only the possibility of a new work of art would make
an adaptation necessary. Merely transcribing words from
the page to images on the screen was not where art would
reside. Adaptation, I would come to see, was not the same as
translation. I assured him that the story would inspire the right
artist. We arranged to meet the next time he was in London.
Lunch at a sleek, trendy restaurant was generously arranged
by the film company. The food was good, the acoustics terrible.
John kept looking up at the ceiling, as though to some­thing lost,
as we tried to talk over the din. His thinking seemed disturbed
in a venue that had neglected the vastness of its guests. We
declined dessert, and he led us to a nearby pub on a street next
to the one where he grew up. Here the atmosphere allowed
conversation. He talked of European filmmakers and artists
with both delicate respect and criticism, framing shared themes,
pointing out minuscule effects like the choice of a character’s
socks. I held tight to my awe, and soon realised he wanted none
of that. When he asked me to send him the novel I was writing,
I felt like I’d betrayed my mission. I wondered what audacity
I might have revealed that led to this offering. I would in time
learn that this is another element of his alchemy. His critical and
artistic practices are not separated from his social engagement.
They are all part of the dialogue of his storytelling. His feedback
on my manuscript would turn out to be just the beginning of
his generosity. I regularly consult with him over the phone
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about ideas and drafts, and he supports me at all stages. Before
we hang up he sometimes says, ‘Now, I put my hand on your
shoulder and turn you back to your work.’
The feeling of wings.
We discussed the novel’s relevance to the new millennium. I
raised concerns about how a contemporary audience might
engage with a story about AIDS now that life-sustaining drugs
are available in rich countries, but inaccessible to many in
African countries. I wanted to somehow acknowledge the nonEuropean experience of HIV and AIDS and the devastation
that was taking place in other parts of the world. He thought for
a long time about this, as he does about everything put to him.
His hesitations were audible. His agreement with my concerns
was palpable, and his response had that feeling of a Polaroid
image revealed. It would happen in an organic way through our
consciousness of it, he said. Without forcing it, and by focusing
on the truth in the story at hand, we would respect the parallel
truth of stories outside of it.
And the thrush sings like a survivor – like a swimmer who swam for
it through the water and made it to the safe side of the night and
flew into the tree to shake the drops from his back and announce:
I’m here!
Over the next few months, we exchanged ideas about film­
makers. He never forced an opinion. Soon in our exchanges
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it became clear that the key blueprint to our shared principles
for the film would be the screenplay. And as it had been so far
my passion alone that had driven the project, John said, ‘Tessa,
why don’t you write the script?’
You’ve never flown, even in dream?
Perhaps.
It’s a question of belief.
I am not a screenwriter by training or by inclination, but from
him I took the suggestion seriously. That feeling of wings: a new
vantage point that art makes possible. I considered his proposal.
I knew that if I were to take the story on I would have to go to my
own body. The only way I could imagine Ninon’s isolation and
feeling of being outcast in Italy was to make her mixed-race, like
me, to have her sense of belonging threatened not only by her
diagnosis but by an intersectionality in a Europe that hadn’t yet
– and arguably still hasn’t – come to terms with its colonial past.
In order to make the script mine I would need Ninon’s journey
to be one of greater displacement. That meant for me that Jean
would have to be black, while Zdena would remain Caucasian
of Slovakian origin.
Writing Ninon as mixed-race now meant that the charac­
ters’ predicaments, and the resonance around her contracting
AIDS, would be more profound on the symbolic levels of
genetics and hybridity. The border crossing in the story would
now have reverberations that are even more compelling today
than when I began. My projection of Jean, as he travels across
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France and Italy on his motorbike – a black man in an altered
Europe, where borders are open but where he is a visible
reminder to Europeans of further change, indeed of the Africa
I had been concerned about representing – brought unexpected
ripples towards deeper interpretations of some of the passages
in the novel.
In the hut on the riverbank where Jean Ferrero is sleeping, the Po is
audible: it makes a noise like lips being licked because the mouth is
too dry. Yet rivers never speak and their indifference is proverbial.
The Alamana, the Po, the Rhine, the Danube, the Dnieper, the Sava,
the Elbe, the Koca, where some lost soldiers of Alexander the Great
fought stragglers of the Persian army in a skirmish of which there is
no record – there’s not a great river anywhere for which men have not
died in battle, their blood washed away in a few minutes. And at night
after the battles, the massacres begin.
Through this projection of race I had arrived at a new way of
thinking about what authenticity was, how a story can adapt
to the personal preoccupations of any given artist, how a single
story will never speak only to a single experience. From that
opening came greater challenges: how to adapt the language of
prose to the language of film. How would a film be true to the
novel’s politics as well as its emotions? Authenticity is a tough
master to serve.
I am a novelist who deals with the themes of belonging and
displacement, but the challenge of the screenplay, as a woman
from a complex diasporic background (when people ask, I
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ream off a list of ‘bloodlines’ and ethnicities: Scottish, African,
English, Amerindian, French, Indian, Portuguese, Chinese,
the order for which is suggested only in the context of British
colonialism), became one that was vital to my development.
The central image of the story for me became the virus.
Not as something pernicious, but as an instrument of change.
Viruses engage in border crossing. Their survival demands
it. A treacherous journey is involved. The destination ‘host’
becomes altered. Change is lasting.
The scene in which Jean meets the hackers also gained
more resonance. These young, vibrant men are emblematic of
the disenfranchised youth of the early internet, whose hero,
Captain Crunch, was breaking into systems. Berger reminds
us that the internet has its roots in resistance, in rebellion,
in freedom.
We hack to stay alive! says Lunatic, we hack to stay on the planet.
And to show them they can’t keep us out and never will …
The hackers have invented a virus too, and Berger foreshadows
groups like Hactivisimo, Cult of the Dead Cow and Anonymous
– hackers who have taken their radical activism into cyberspace.
Within the frame of change and resistance, the wedding
itself becomes a border crossing: the passage that pernicious
despair makes towards hope. The story’s border crossings
involve countries, the past to the present, a generation of
Europeans from behind a wall, and each of these is embodied
in the characters. Sex transmits the HIV virus, and as such the
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body becomes the site of ultimate danger and change. But Gino
is not afraid, and it is his passion in the face of death that drives
the narrative, his refusal to be separated from love. So the virus
paradoxically leads to the healing of wounds.
I was pushing, says Gino, pushing and pushing with my feet against
the planks – his laughter was all mixed up with the sunlight and
with what he was saying – to lift you up and up and up and the wall
of the house fell down!
Being mixed-race signifies many borders already crossed.
The losses implicit in the crossings, along with the explicit
newness that needs a voice – a chorus of voices – will be, in
the film, the aesthetic shorthand to Berger’s prescience of the
changes that were underway in 1990 and are culminating with
urgency today.
‘As soon as we use the terms “us” and “them”,’ I once heard
John say in an interview, ‘there is the potential for barbarism.’
His insistence on a social ‘we’ is underscored by the wedding.
The celebration, the healing, the ordinary joy: the wedding
scene is an affirmation of shared spirit.
It’s hard, he says. We’re living on the brink and it’s hard because
we’ve lost the habit.
A script is only a map. The next crucial bridge to a film
became finding the right director. Now, a couple of years
into the process, the original producers were no longer
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involved and I had no money to develop the project myself.
The Canadian production company Screen Sirens contacted
me independently, spurred by the passion of Helen du Toit,
who, like me, had experienced a coup de foudre on first reading
the novel. They attached the gifted director Keith Behrman
to collaborate with me. The team worked in development
for several years, until various circumstances changed and
the project was stalled. Even so, the issues that arose in
conversations between creative and financial partners brought
more light to the complexities of an authentic portrayal. As the
years passed, it became clear that we were now dealing with
a period film and the challenges of representing a complex
moment in history. Visual choices would produce different
emotions. Making an adaptation was another border crossing,
after all, and it was key in my evolution as an artist. Throughout
all of this, John was humble, trusting, grateful. I learned
patience and faith in art. I also learned about the restrictions
of co-productions, the tyranny of commercialism, and the
fickleness of passions, but these only served to strengthen my
conviction that this slow road to making art might be the only
reason to do anything.
We’ve lost the habit.
Of flying?
No, of living on a ledge.
Helen du Toit and I eventually decided to go it alone. We have
a director, Andrea Pallaoro, whose response to the novel
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matches ours. An Italian who is intimately familiar with the
River Po, where the waters change all the while and stay the same
only on the map, he has taken on the script to infuse it with the
language of cinema and his own vision. The screenplay is no
longer mine, but as a creative producer I am learning a different
side of collective art making.
I dream of a film.
I dream of showing it to John. The barbarism of ‘us’ and
‘them’ dialogues proliferate around us.
You have to be frightened, he says.
Frightened I am.
Then you’ll fly.
At the end of the novel, the blind narrator slips into the future
tense. He imagines rather than recounts the wedding, and this
verb tense bears the pearl of Berger’s offering:
They will sit side by side at the large table, surrounded by thirty
people, and she will notice everything which is happening. Nothing
will escape her. Wedding feasts are the happiest because something
new is beginning, and with the newness comes a reminder of
appetite, even to the oldest guests.
And here is where we meet (to borrow another Berger title):2 at
the intersection of our bodies, our countries, and our losses.
Ninon’s foreshadowed death reminds us that the dead are
among us and that their spirit is unifying. If we forget them,
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we forget ourselves. The eternal border crossing is from now
towards the future, and the future is all about possibility.
This long journey towards a film adaptation feels like the
slowness of awareness, of awakening – an evolution towards
a collective authenticity. The years feel like nothing. And the
novel is the perfect tama.
What shall we do before eternity?
Take our time.
NOTES
1
Berger, J. (1995) To the Wedding, London: Bloomsbury. All italicised
passages in my essay are taken from this novel.
2 Berger, J. (2005) Here Is Where We Meet, London: Bloomsbury.
1 02
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